Map Men

Recently I made a short stop motion animation for my friend, and since I made these scans of many of the paper props I used, I thought it would be cool to write a blog post about it.

I decided to use stop motion because I had a short turnaround and figured I would be better equipped to make the 530 frames I needed if I used a combination of stop motion and digital animation. I also really wanted to try out that combination, because it's not something I've done a huge amount before, and I find it gives a really interesting effect to kinda combine those two planes of existence.

The fact that you can easily pinpoint the digitally drawn-over parts creates a kind of interest disconnect. You know they are separate elements, and they sorta combine to make a slightly surreal universe.

I love the collection of props I made. They are all my children. Especially the star maps.

Animation is so weird though. This definitely has a clunky feel, which I like, but alongside the narration its jumbliness could use tempering. The speed and rigid feel are the things I would work on if I was to make this again. Maybe I'd include more articulated human characters with more expressive and considered movements.

This animation was ultimately more focused on the sea of movement created by shifting backgrounds and a lot of moving parts at once, but it would have been cool to have some more serene moments and small, slow character movements. It's a big soup of whirling things.

Regardless, it was fun to make.